The great beach

The Flight of Birds

The appearance of migratory birds in fall and spring, or simply their constant activity, suggests their range. The ability that a gull displays in the turmoil of the air is enough to bring other winds to these shores, to make you realize that the beach joins the long shore line between Cape Cod and Florida, that the waters to the north of us move on toward Labrador and Baffin Bay. Their wings are allied to the circulation of the North Atlantic. New England is not so far from the Arctic Circle, and when the auks, the old squaws, or the buntings come down to Cape Cod in the autumn they bring the proof with them.

We have had an appalling record this side of the Atlantic, of decimating the population of sea birds, which are more vulnerable than other species because of their nesting habits, on islands or rocky foreshores. The great auk has gone, and the puffins reduced to small numbers. If we were able to kill them all off, either on purpose or through lack of responsibility, what little island people it would make us!

The very colors of a murre, or a razor-billed auk, a contrasting black and white like penguins, suggest the black cliffs and rocky headlands where they evolved, the white snow and ice, the cast of deep and icy waters. One June day, when the beach at Race Point was glaring with light, and all the winter leavings, like the twisted dead stalks of dusty miller, were being replaced by a freshness in the shine and scent of things, I saw a dovekie, or little auk, on the beach a few yards away from the water. It is a very small bird, though conspicuous enough with its penguinlike stance, its black and white plumage, and though it was in full view of a number of bathers no one saw it. When I approached, this seasonal anachronism ran rather than flew away from me down the sands into the water where it promptly dove out of sight to bob up out of harm’s way many yards offshore. Since most dovekies return north in late winter, I supposed it was a “nonbreeding straggler.” They migrate south in the fall to more temperate waters not locked in ice like their home feeding grounds. Over a period of years and at unpredictable times, there are “Dovekie wrecks” when these birds are blown inland by gale winds and show up in the most unlikely places: ponds, back yards, side roads, gardens, filling stations or shopping centers. Since they are not able to take off from land with any ease, if at all, they are vulnerable to predators of all kinds, provided they survive exhaustion and starvation. Some years ago I saw a number of them lying dead for several miles along the Cape Cod highway.

The dovekies are messengers from the north. The way the gulls use the wind as it is deflected from the waves, or ride into it, hovering, then gliding down, is symptomatic of the sailing skill of other birds that travel far beyond the shore, the aerodynamics of the open sea. They are masters of the art of air as no plane can ever be. I remember watching some fulmars in the wake of a ship one wind-tossed day, the great blue-green waves in rocking fullness shouldered with foam. They glided between the crests and troughs of the waves with effortless deliberation, and then lifted, curved away in a wide arc, and returned. Back and forth, they seemed to tip the waters surface with their wings and clip the waves, gliding and curving with them, expending no excess energy at all. I felt them rise on the upward air in my lungs, my admiration.

In birds you see pure action personified, an endless spontaneity reacting to the air, the season, the light, and on clear nights the constellations that may help them find their way. A flock of red-backed sandpipers or sanderlings, all spinning, wheeling, and sun-reflecting at once, have an ecstatic dash, a common brightness set going in them which must carry them a long way. They are long-distance migrants flitting from one end of the earth, one shore line to the next, and judging by their actions it is hard to believe that they could ever rest. Searching for crustaceans or sand worms along the beach, they run on flickering black legs, bodies tilted forward, flitting, bobbing in syncopation. When close to the surf they may fly up briefly when it piles in and then drop down again when it retreats. With their quick, automatic run, and heads constantly jerking forward and back they seem to be endowed with an almost comic gift of hurrying.

Suddenly, with a sharp piping cry a sanderling flies off the beach and then disappears like a gray chip over the water, a tide bird faster than the tides, where there is no following it. This bird is quick and sweet, and cleans the earth of too much hesitation.

Of all the birds that visit the beach during fall and winter I take most delight in the snow buntings. They have such freshness in them, skimming the cliffs, rushing by like bits of foam. The white in their plumage is so pure, snow paths between markings of black and cinnamon, like briers and weed stalks, with suggestions of greenish gray when the sun shines on them. They are birds of the Arctic tundra, companions of the musk ox. They fly up suddenly, as they are constantly doing at the least disturbance, their whiteness dancing up above the beach or along the faces of the cliffs, and then settle down again, pecking away, at home in wastes and barren land, the lonely stretches of the world, these are flowers, snowflakes, foam, fitted to a poverty and its freedom.

They are seed eaters like sparrows, and may also eat such tiny creatures as they find along the beach, and they are always flocking and scattering out from one rise and level to the next. To me, the fanciful difference between buntings and sparrows, sanderlings, gulls, horned larks, and many other visitors to seaside lands is their trait of invisibility. It is not only their whiteness—they look almost entirely white seen from underneath, appearing and disappearing like clouds—and a plumage which belongs to the accents of sunlight, grass stalks, dune shadows, on the bare ground—but their actions. With a motion reminiscent of the roller-coaster type of flight which the goldfinches have, flocks of buntings will pour down onto the cliff top or beach, spread out and then fly up again, with an inner billowing, a dipping, and rising as they go. Twittering with a note of tinkling bells in the high air beside the bowling sea, they swing and then burst in gentle snow flights across the ground, through one opening, one neat run, one clean escape to another. They turn the invisible into reality. They have a continual lift, the agitation inherent in all life. They fly up ahead of me as sparks out of the unseen rest and center of things.

Another bird of the tundra, a specter from the far north which appears irregularly over the years during wintertime to hunt for rodents and occasional birds along the coast is the snowy owl. I remember seeing a mounted specimen when I was a boy and thinking it was the most desirable thing on earth to own, and since I never did own one, the snowy owl stayed intangible and magnificent in my mind; and the first live one I ever saw did nothing to disabuse me of my impression. They migrate to beaches, salt marshes, and islands along the coast, choosing elevations as a rule, hummocks, knolls, or dunes from which they can survey the surrounding countryside during their hunting season, watching the man or beach buggy arrive as well as evidence of prey. The one I saw was way down the south end of North Beach, that stretch of Nauset beach which ends at the straits separating it from Monomoy. It was perched on a hummock, and at first was nearly indistinguishable from the top of a white picket fence buried in sand, or the kind of white marble marker, rounded at the top, which you might see on a roadside in Vermont. We were driving toward it in a beach buggy and when it flew off low with big, soft, bowed wings, its feathers, white and flecked with gray, took on a blue-ash hue from the winter light and the uneven shadowy land around it. The great owl lighted calmly on another hummock further on. It stared straight at us out of fierce yellow eyes, with inscrutable dignity, and when we turned and came at it from another direction its head almost swiveled all the way around, looking at us from over its back. It kept its place in center stage.

Many thousands of eider ducks winter in Cape Cod waters. During October and November especially they can be seen shuttling back and forth across the sea beyond the Outer Beach. Some feed, principally on mussels, in the bay region or off Chatham and along other shallow shores and inlets, but the majority—an estimated 500,000—spend the winter over the shoals between Monomoy and Nantucket. Seen close to, as they fly low over the water, they are as sturdy, clean shaped, and of good design—the red-brown females, and males patterned in black and white—as a coastal vessel, a dory, or a skiff. From the beach you can see them fly over water in single lines, sometimes as much as a half a mile or more in length, with a steady, throbbing flight, like a suspended string of beads, alternately white and brown.

By contrast brant fly in longer, thicker lines, and sometimes show up like shivering black specks high over the sea. Well into December the gannets pass by over the sea surfaces too, flying singly for the most part, their broad white backs and long black-tipped wings reflecting the sunlight as they turn, to dive in their grand manner down, from fifty feet or more in the air, hard and bold into the water, sending up jets of spray.

Clutching at any aspect of nature is to seize a drop of water in your hand. Ebb and flow passes the great beach, the eternally wide ebb and flow of day and night passes the cliff tops, all earth’s shadows wave across its seas, and yet this is the precise route of the birds, their direction and their home. They know its guidelines inwardly. For us, who put so much emphasis on outward instruments, this can be almost impossible to understand.

Still, we can exaggerate the division between us. We are all at home together, however we use the stars and seasons in our separate ways. Men are as subject to mortality as birds, even though the latter can’t dwell upon it. They in turn are vulnerable to chance, to disease, to going astray and meeting with mishaps when confronted by the freakishness and violence of the weather. Many a duck or sea bird, caught on a lee shore or in a marshy inlet during a great storm may be unable to rise into the wind and is exhausted or swept away and seriously injured while trying. Life and death, joy and disaster, go wing to wing. Birds have less capacity to deceive themselves than we, being unable to avoid the perils of nature and at the same time its protective power.

I had similar thoughts in mind one day in November during a violent coastal storm while watching some gulls, ringed-bill and herring, together with a few shore birds, that were gathered at the head of an inlet along a relatively sheltered part of the Bay. The Outer Beach was of a violence that day which could hardly be approached, either on foot or in contemplation. Even here the storm winds were relentless, hard and cold, flicking and driving the sands along the shore, whipping the marsh waters behind it into a froth. Sanderlings made short, low, flying hops back and forth, but were unable to do their usual free hurrying and basket-swinging flights along the shore. The gulls stood in shallow water facing the wind, water that was being whipped and lashed, and sometimes they would drop down sideways a little before the wind’s force, thrown slightly off balance, acting like a man who has been cut across the face. Taking to the air just above the ground they would find difficulty in maneuvering and were forced back, sometimes fifty feet or more, to continue standing where they dropped back to the ground; but even in this they showed a certain supple power, a control aware of its limits, the sinewy economy of wings lifted in the wind, the plain sky beauty of feathers gray and white. The storm was ending, although the water was still being whiplashed into foam. The light was very cold and the sky line was heaped with sunset fires.

Surely everything, everywhere, was vulnerable, and yet it was that bird closeness to such primal powers as might seem to us bitter, alien, and cruel—the gods of the north, of the waters and the winds—that gave them an essential balance, a rightful place. That great sky of theirs was unexplored. It came down to me that regardless of what he learns, there is so much for a man to go on asking.

What can birds tell you, other than displaying those traits of aggression, or fear, or mutual attraction, which we may recognize when observing their behavior? We have a little fear in ourselves, when looking on, that we may go too far in mixing up our own traits and terms with theirs; but each will manage to keep his territory, untransgressed by the other, and each takes part in the high order of nature. Watching the birds, I have seen ceremony, ritual, love-making, display, all worthy of admiration by the most glittering of human cultures. The speech of men and the speech of birds do not divide us altogether. In silence is unity.

Perhaps the most eloquent thing about birds is that which we will probably never learn to decipher. In his study of puffins, R. M. Lockeley refers to their “subtle, silent-gesture language.” That language is part of a still more silent order, the dark realm of existence where all their actions and necessities have their play. Approach with patience and with care.

One day I had walked for several miles along the cliffs toward Eastham, through thickets of scrub oak, and bayberry that smelled very pungently in the fall of the year. The sky was full of shifting winds and the day as I walked full of weather changes, from an edge of cold to warmth and back again. An early sun began to be covered by pale-gray clouds and there was a mauve light over the sea. I caught sight of a little wren along the way, and there was a number of sparrows, both seen and heard—song, chipping, seaside, and probably others. It was a low, shifting thicket world full of potential surprise, bordered by oceanic sound, rocking with light and air.

I retraced my steps a few hours later over a narrow sandy road, at times no more than a track, and I saw a pigeon hawk flying off ahead of me, stroking deliberately and quickly with its long wings. Then I noticed another one roosting on a broken-off tree several hundred feet back of the cliff just outside a wood of pitch pines. The first one made off in that direction too, roosting not far from its companion on a dead stump, and they both stayed absolutely still, like falcons on an Egyptian frieze. I could hear a blue jay screaming somewhere in the background.

I noticed feathers scattered on the path, gray and blue, blowing ahead of me; and then, there it was, a blue jay freshly killed, its breast bare of feathers and shining red like some rock wet with sea splash in the crimson path of the setting sun. What kind of a game led up to this? Could the two hawks, one tempting the jay by its distance, the other scaring it by its proximity, have managed to send it out into the open where it had no chance against their swift and effortless pursuit? I walked ahead for a short distance and then waited, watching through field glasses for the hawks to come back. The nearest one did, after a few minutes, beating down tentatively over the kill, then rising again and leaving with its supple flight. The other had moved a little closer and roosted on an abandoned telephone pole, full of an ancient poise, wonderfully still. After that, I am sure, they never went back to the road until I had gone for good. The grace and tension, the space in that formal scene stayed with me for a long time.